A gathering of the wealthy and noble ite the great assembly town of a west-end hotel in the height of the London season. Some very attractive fun: be on hand, for the road is thronged with carriages, and the hotel lobby with liveried But beside the Chairman of the meeting, a stately white-haired bishop, we sce only a quietly cessed Indy and tivo little boys. And now the bishop rises to remind us that we are about t" witness some results of the so-called German system, recently adopted in Englan, of training the deaf in vocal speech and lip-reading. The speaker alludes to the now well-established fact that the prevalent expression as applied to this afflicted class—'deaf and dumb"—is a misnomer; that the vocal organs are as a rule perfect with the dent as with the hearing; so that there needs m of mechanical training to organs into use; and that one signal advantage of such acquirement is the strengthening of the lungs; for statistics show that chest-disease is more prevalent with the so-called dent-mutes than with the speaking.
And then the Indy-teac'wwr with her two pupils, sweet-freed children of about eight and ten, steel forward, and wrote sone letters nhinations of letters on a black h the sounts of which the boys distinctly pronounced. When, now and then, one of them paused, or muds acme slight mistake, the torcher corrected him by the motion of her lips, Next a gaily-painted picture of farmyard was placed on the board, and the boys named the object to which the teacher pointed. That they spoke with intelligence was plainly shown by their ocewsional answers to her questions, What is that woman i he is feeding the fowls." There painful or unnatural, only a certain monotony in the children's voices, "These boys have been some months ander training," Miss H—informed us, "For the fest three months no pupil goos bay. albion drill' as we call the i ions you saw on the board sometimes give them a word for a wor for a reward!" Oh for those of us whose little ones from infancy are prattling so eagerly, what a touching reminder of the privation of those deaf children, and of those who love them? Months of daily, patient teaching, of incessant mechanical reiteration, and then, "one word for a reward."
The main object of the present gather was to interest the benevolent rich inn scheme for bringing this beneficent instrueion within the reach of the poor, by establishing " training school for teachers, where deaf children could be received for very small payment; while eventually some of the student teachers would be available for classes of the deaf connected with board and other schools. We are glad to say this phu has been carried out in a now successful institution at Ealing.
The scone changes, A lowly native house in North China, We are in a whitewashed room, the boards hare but for a piece of straw matting Inid down along the side the audience, a little group of missionary friends, is to occupy.
And the exhibition in question is that of the ncquicements of seven little deaf Chinese boys, from homes of direst poverty, for whose education, a year ago, this humble work was begun, Much preparation has gone to that examination ceremony, and very important do the little scholars look. Seats have been borrowed - from neighbours, all the Christmas cards at able have been pinned to the walls, -while
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.